Wallace Stegner was one of America's greatest writers and also founded the Creative Writing program at Stanford. I never had the honor of meeting him, but his daughter-in-law, writer Lynn Stegner, helped me with my novel, The Arrow Catcher. While Lynn kept me writing, her father-in-law almost caused me to quit. I came across a passage in his novel, Big Rock Candy Mountain, that was so good that I felt I had no business calling myself a writer. The passage went as follows:
"There had been a wind during the night and all the loneliness of the world had swept up out of the Southwest. The boy had heard it wailing through the screens of the sleeping porch where he lay and heard the wash tub break loose from the outside wall and roll down into the coulee… and the slam of the screen door and his mother's padding feet as she rose to fasten things down. Through one, half-opened eye he had peered up from his pillow to see the moon skimming windily through an illuminous sky. In his mind’s eye, he could see prairie outside with its cactus and its wooly grass white under the moon. And the wind, whining across that vast, oceanic land, sang through the screens and sang him back to sleep.”
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